Midair Warning

The F16 has better than TCAS-- it has in board radar

http://www.northropgrumman.com/Capab...s/default.aspx

Well said. Thx!

Maybe things have changed, but when I was flying a lot of IFR, ATC had
no duty to separate IFR and VFR traffic /_in VMC_/. The best you could
hope for as a VFR pilot was to request flight following and then, on a
workload allowing basis, ATC would issue advisories on IFR traffic.
Likewise, workload allowing, ATC would issue advisories of VFR aircraft
to IFR aircraft. The pilot in command has always had the responsibility
of maintaining separation from other aircraft in VMC.

Someone mentioned earlier that, if the Cessna had had a Power Flarm
installed, he would have seen the F-16. I'll bet that if a poll of
general aviation pilots _/in the USA/_ asking their opinion of Power
Flarm was taken the vast majority of answers would be, "What's Power
Flarm?". We glider pilots live in a very small community mostly unknown
to the rest of aviation and a piece of equipment which is to most glider
pilots the end-all of safety is irrelevant to general aviation.

Discussing this tragic accident on this forum has no real bearing on
soaring other than the admonition to keep your head out and your eyes open.

On 7/10/2015 11:57 PM, Mike Schumann wrote:
On Friday, July 10, 2015 at 7:37:08 PM UTC-5, kirk.stant wrote:
Transponders are only HALF the solution. You also need a means to detect other aircraft in your vicinity, so that YOU can initiate detection and avoidance. A transponder by itself will do ABSOLUTELY NO GOOD in preventing a glider to glider, or glider to VFR power (not talking to center) mid-air.

Fighters do not carry TCAS. They MAY be talking to center, but in a MOA they may never get a call about your presence from ATC, even if you have a transponder. Most have radar, and many have transponder interrogators that should let them detect you well before a midair will occur (I had this capability in old F-4Es back in the 80s and used it a lot while low in MOAs to find and avoid VFR traffic).

But - I think it is REALLY foolish to depend on your transponder and ATC to keep you safe - apparently it didn't work in this case. If the Cessna had been carrying a PCAS or PowerFLARM he may have detected the F-16 in time to at least look for it.

Bottom line. See and Avoid really doesn't work. Big Sky Theory works MOST of the time. Transponders are good for letting airliners see you, but are not much help against VFR traffic or other gliders. PCAS is cheap, and works. Transponder and PF is the best current equipment fit, hands down.

Kirk
66
The other half of the solution is that ATC (whether Military or Civilian) should provide traffic separation between VFR and IFR traffic, and ALL high speed aircraft (including Military) should be equipped with TCAS or equivalent collision warning or avoidance systems.

This apparently wasn't the case in this instance. The moral of the story is that GA and Glider pilots can't rely on the other guys to avoid collisions. We need to proactively keep track of all the traffic in our vicinity and get out of the way. Low cost ADS-B (IN and OUT) systems and TIS-B are going to be a big help.

--
Dan Marotta

Indeed most GA never heard of PowerFlarm.
The soaring community is obviously ahead of power pilots with collision avoidance technology, and the reason is that we took the matter in our own hands and did not wait for the FAA to protect us. It is too bad that most GA is still depending on See and Avoid when the technology exists for more than a decade!

Ramy

The problem is, PowerFlarm is raised to the FAA's attention, it will need to be certified, raising the cost by around 5x.

That's still true. But I have always found ATC to be quite vigilant in reporting traffic with flight following or IFR in VMC, if not necessarily providing collision avoidance vectors. They do still get radar alerts if you have a TXP, and sometimes primary targets. One time flying 500' offshore Monterey bay at 500' in a citabria, what was then called Monterey Approach called to tell me that there was a primary target my altitude 1 mile, "but it could be an 18-wheeler on Highway 1."

There is much more wrong with the Power Flarm comment.
I have Flarm.
Transponder targets do not provide the information that Flarm targets have.
One has to actually visually search for the transponder target.
At the speeds the F-16 was travelling....Flarm is iffy.

On Saturday, July 11, 2015 at 11:00:12 AM UTC-4, wrote:
There is much more wrong with the Power Flarm comment.
I have Flarm.
Transponder targets do not provide the information that Flarm targets have.
One has to actually visually search for the transponder target.
At the speeds the F-16 was travelling....Flarm is iffy.

"Under 10,000ft, under 250kts", granted, that's still ~450'/second if you're not moving, even more if you're head on.
I would guess the jet was even slower than 250kts "in the pattern".

While I agree that we should try to learn from this accident, sometimes "crap happens" regardless of how many "roadblocks to crap" we throw up.

On Saturday, July 11, 2015 at 5:37:00 AM UTC-7, Bob Pasker wrote:
The F16 has better than TCAS-- it has in board radar

http://www.northropgrumman.com/Capab...s/default.aspx

No. Radar and TCAS are not related. Radar is not some magic thing that sees aircraft all around you, issues a traffic warning etc.

On Saturday, July 11, 2015 at 8:00:12 AM UTC-7, wrote:
There is much more wrong with the Power Flarm comment.
I have Flarm.
Transponder targets do not provide the information that Flarm targets have.
One has to actually visually search for the transponder target.
At the speeds the F-16 was travelling....Flarm is iffy.

The Flarm part of this thread is going a bit off the rails. PowerFLARM is not targeted at GA use (certainly not in the USA), for very good reasons. Well maybe the few GA aircraft that should have PowerFLARM are tow planes.

AFAIK the F-16C is not equipped with 1090ES Out, it is equipped with a very capable military/IFF transponder that supports Mode S and will show up as a PCAS alert on a PowerFLARM... given all the usual requirements like the transponder the F16 would need to be being interrogated etc. If the USAF eventually equips their fighters with 1090ES out then a PowerFLARM would provide much more useful warning (surprise! cost and complexity of installing ADS-B out affects the military as well).

PCAS is just not a very effective warning against a fast jet like an F-16 (even if flying 250 knots), you have no clue what direction the treat is in, you may not get much warning time, the jets may maneuver rapidly vertical (outside of the PCAs warning box), they are camouflaged, small and and difficult to see. There are ADS-B based options that a GA aircraft could deploy that would (via TIS-B) better show the F-16 traffic (but they also are not perfect), but the cost and hassle of installing those is likely not appealing to many lower-end GA aircraft owners.

Flarm does not need to be "raised to the FAA's attention".. the FAA is well aware of what Flarm is, including the FAA folks who worked on the recent TABS TSO. The soaring community would seriously harm it's reputation by proposing PowerFLARM for use in GA aircraft, it is just not suitable for that, not in the unique USA ADS-B market. FLARM certainly knows that and is not marketing the product for GA users in the USA. And likewise transponder and ADS-B solutions are not suitable for use in gliders for glider-glider traffic awareness. Unfortunately we are stuck in that space spanning two worlds and for some glider owners/pilots that means, and will increasingly mean, equipping with both PowerFLARM and a transponder and maybe other parts of the ADS-B puzzle (like possibly TABS if that takes off).